Archive for December 16th, 2012

A preliminary investigation by Mexico City’s human rights commission has found evidence of police brutality and arbitrary detentions during the violent protests during last Saturday’s [Dec. 1] inauguration of President Enrique Peña Nieto.

The ongoing investigation has identified at least four cases of possible torture, three of them involving electric shocks, as well as 22 cases of unjustified arrests among the 70 people still in jail in relation to the protests. Many of these face a preliminary charge of “attacks against the public peace”, which carries a long prison term.

Rich Grabner of Mexfiles has some comment on whether the violence was instigated by radicals within the movement or by provocateurs. He links to a report in SDPNoticias in which it is alleged that people were paid to cause trouble. They sure didn’t get paid a lot to get their heads broken.

El Universal is hyping damages which amount to spraypainting sculptures. Yes, it may have cost 240 million pesos to restore the Hemiciclo a Juarez and the Alameda, but they weren’t exactly reduced to rubble.

The Occupy Wall Street protests have captured America’s political imagination. Polls show that two-thirds of the nation now believe that America’s enormous wealth ought to be “distributed more evenly.” However, almost as many Americans–well over half–feel the protests will ultimately have “little impact” on inequality in America. What explains this disconnect? Most Americans have resigned themselves to believing that the rich simply always get their way.

Except they don’t.

A century ago, the United States hosted a super-rich even more domineering than ours today. Yet fifty years later, that super-rich had almost entirely disappeared. Their majestic mansions and estates had become museums and college campuses, and America had become a vibrant, mass middle class nation, the first and finest the world had ever seen.

Americans today ought to be taking no small inspiration from this stunning change. After all, if our forbears successfully beat back grand fortune, why can’t we? But this transformation is inspiring virtually no one. Why? Because the story behind it has remained almost totally unknown, until now.

This lively popular history will speak directly to the political hopelessness so many Americans feel. By tracing how average Americans took down plutocracy over the first half of the 20th Century–and how plutocracy came back– The Rich Don’t Always Win will outfit Occupy Wall Street America with a deeper understanding of what we need to do to get the United States back on track to the American dream.